A young person recently asked me what they should write to make money.

“Checks,” I said.

Then I had to explain what a checkbook was. About halfway through the history lesson, I could tell I had lost them. So I offered a more contemporary answer: Due to market forces well beyond our control—everything from artificial intelligence to declining literacy, with even The New York Times leaning into vertical video—they needn’t worry too much about making money as a writer.

Problem solved.

And yet, opportunity appears to be everywhere. Say the right thing, the right way, on the social-media platform du jour, and you stand a chance of going viral, attracting an agent and scoring a book deal.

But that’s a lottery, not a career plan. We may all have access to the same tools and algorithmic mojo, but access is not agency. There are two sides to every gate: the gatekeepers and the gatecrashers. I think we know which side we are on.

You want to be a writer? Write.

It is that simple, though not necessarily easy. It helps to develop the skills peculiar to the vocation: observation, solitude, curiosity, nerve, resilience and the ability to continue working when no one appears to care. A creative life is ultimately a lifestyle choice, and like any walk on the wild/mild side, it can be as fraught as it is rewarding.

Of course, it would be wonderful to become a successful practitioner of one’s medium, a cause célèbre or, ideally, both. I bet. Develop enough gravitas and eventually the mere mention of your name may confer a little esteem by proxy upon whoever drops it. Your work expands into books, appearances, adaptations and ancillary products. You become, basically, an economy unto yourself—in short, an institution.

But that is not the point. It is merely one possible result.

The point may not even be the work itself. It is the identity, and the particular lens that identity gives you: a way to see the world differently and, conversely, to be seen differently by the world. Sometimes in a spotlight. Sometimes by the dim candle in the Parisian garret of your mind.

Call yourself a writer. Call yourself an artist. Call yourself Ishmael. But choose something, then inhabit it fully.

Live long, die fast and leave a beautiful corpus.

As I was writing this to you, staring into the void and contemplating what these weekly little missives mean over a second glass of grenache, an enterprising little boy known to the staff and regulars of my favorite wine bar visited my table.

The kid was distributing little, cartoon stickers to every customer. My sticker depicted an octopus tentacle emerging from the ocean with a message in a bottle grasped in its tentacle. And there was my answer—that’s this whole gig. I write messages for bottles.

Synchronicity is the perception of a meaningful coincidence wherein an internal thought or sensation matches an external event without an apparent causal relationship between them. In my 20s, I lived in a state of perpetual synchronicity—everything mattered, had meaning, and pointed toward some self-affirming fate aligned with the machinations of the cosmos. I was Jung and dumb and swimming in condensed Joseph Campbell’s soup.

One friend from that era forged an entire lifestyle from synchronicity and still texts me about it whenever he experiences it. Until today, I envied him—by my 40s, I’d fallen out of this magic synchronization with the universe, thinking meaningless and chaos were more practical.

Now, in my mid-50s, I can see how stupid my falling out was and how it negates the entire premise of being human. We are meaning making machines—we can’t help but divine secrets, codes, grand plans and plots in our experience. It could be an evolutionary tic, a mutation, a fatal flaw, but it’s defining and I’m inclined to embrace it.

We tell stories to ourselves and each other, compare notes, entwine narratives and revel in side-quests that, through the smudged lens of introspection, look something like meaning. Then we jot it down, bottle it up, and throw it into an ocean of all possible outcomes on the off chance another randomly sentient complex of stardust might get it.

True story: When we were young winos, another friend and I drained a bottle of wine and replaced its contents with a note, which—naively—I signed before tossing into the Petaluma River. A few weeks later, the bottle greeted my return, atop my desk at the Argus-Courier, accompanied by a reply written by the river-keeper, David Yearsley, chiding me for littering. So, don’t do that

But…

Bottle ye messages while ye may.

I have spent my entire career weathering the vicissitudes of the media game—from classified ad-eating Craigslist in the early internet to paywall snafus (“information wants to be free—oops”) to the algorithmic siphonings of social media, Big Tech’s annexation of advertising and the ever-receding mirage of the creator economy.

Some will argue the future has never looked bleaker for the rag-and-bone shop of journalism. I’m not so sure.

One of the peculiar quirks of the alternative newsweekly trade is that our print day—Wednesday—arrives fashionably late to the party. By the time ink hits paper, the news cycle has already burned through several outrages, issued corrections or excoriations, and moved on to the next big thing.

Between this writing and your reading, something ridiculous and existentially irresponsible will have emanated from Washington. Ditto an apocalyptic innovation courtesy of Silicon Valley, whilst Hollywood laments and lauds its demise and rebirth in a single breath, and …

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Most self-help gurus say we do have more, maybe even three, with additional modules available for download.

The melancholy Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It counts seven acts. If we’re to go with Fitzgerald’s take, that would leave us Americans, per Jacques’ monologue, perpetually “mewling and puking.” That generally ends in college, but I’ve met some lifetime learners as well.

So, who do we trust in this regard, Fitzgerald or Shakespeare? The latter’s been at it 400 years longer than Fitzgerald, so let’s go with him. Besides, unlike Shakespeare, Fitzgerald never had a hit in his lifetime. The Great Gatsby, for example, only became one after its author’s death, when it was issued as a paperback Armed Services edition, read by GIs when not getting shot at.

Notably, Fitzgerald died before finishing The Last Tycoon, the novel in which his second act supposition appears. At least two subsequent wri…

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It begins…

What drives Petaluma’s Daedalus Howell, host of ‘The Drive’ radio show?

Daedalus Howell is on the air.

“Welcome back to ‘The Drive with Daedalus Howell,’ 95.5 FM,” he said at 3:34 p.m. on a warm afternoon in late March, as the red “On Air” sign in Wine Country Radio’s Studio G suddenly lit up after a five-minute commercial break. “Let’s take a quick look at the traffic, shall we? Good news! That accident we reported earlier by Third Street in Santa Rosa has almost entirely cleared up.”

While producer Aurelio Aguilar adjusted knobs on his control panel, Howell’s words flowed by as cleanly and fluidly as a long, sinuous chain of dominoes falling one after another…

Read the rest of Templeton’s story at the Press Democrat.

The post In the News: Media Moment for ‘The Drive’ appeared first on Dae…

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Listen to our recent interview from The Drive 95.5 FM or read the transcript below:

The film screens at 3:40 pm, Monday, April 20, at Rialto Cinemas, 6868 McKinley St., Sebastopol, CA, followed by a Q&A with Goodman and Academy Award-Nominated director Tia Lessin, which yours truly will moderate.

There are easier ways to spend a life than confronting evasive presidents, riot police, war crimes, billionaires and the occasional smug pundit before breakfast. Journalist Amy Goodman chose otherwise.

For three decades, Goodman has hosted Democracy Now!, the daily independent news program. Now she is the subject of a new documentary, Steal This Story Please, co-directed by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. The film argues that Goodman’s pr…

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Such is the case with my current movie project—an art-house extravaganza satirizing the usual suspects: government, religion, corporations, universities and, of course, the media. When a character questions whether the CIA would actually fund research into psychic espionage, another quips, “Well, they funded abstract expressionism, which is far more dangerous.”

This is true. The CIA also funded literary magazines and possibly the Scorpions’ 1990 power ballad “Wind of Change.” And abstract expressionism is far more dangerous (look what it did to Jack the Dripper).

Much of this has been revealed in declassified documents, first-hand testimonies, or the occasional podcast, like journo Patrick Radden Keefe’s paean to the Scorps’ hand in the Cold War, which may itself have been developed by the …

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“Your career is bifurcated between making art and making media,” he explained.

I blinked until he explained what “bifurcated” meant too.

I replied that I was making a living.

After he stopped laughing, he said that’s why I’m a singing waiter—I’m sublimating my art into the day job.

I made a case for being a practitioner of the “fine art of media,” which convinced neither of us.

A fancy business newsletter I read encourages brands to identify tensions in our culture and market their resolution. The go-to example is usually some do-gooder company that helps high-end consumers assuage their guilty participation in an inherently exploitative capitalist system by leveraging part of their purchase into the service of a cause. These companies proliferated in the aughts and teens.

Now, a tension I perceive amongst my cohort is this singing waite…

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And though I’m deep in the trickster hero phase of my professional aspirations, I couldn’t fathom publishing stories that could be perceived as a willful indulgence of “fake news.” That’s not to say I don’t think we all need a laugh right now, given the profound absurdity and horrors of our present moment. As they say, laughter is the best medicine so long as one doesn’t overdose. 

Yes, laughter can kill. The most common way is through laughter-induced syncope, in which a person loses consciousness while laughing and then dies by some other means, i.e., falling, choking, or if they happen to be laughing at ICE.

A famous case from antiquity occurred to Chrysippus of Soli, the noted stoic ph…

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Writers like to leave a mark. Literally, figuratively and sometimes on a small engraved plaque at a local wine bar.

Such is the case at Petaluma’s La Dolce Vita Wine Lounge, where a small sign reads, simply, “Daedalus Howell wrote here.” It’s part artistic gesture, part future historical breadcrumb and entirely appropriate for a place where words—and wine—have flowed with unusual generosity.

La Dolce Vita has been my unofficial salon for years, the kind of establishment where a notebook opens easily and sentences tend to follow. At 18½ years old, the lounge remains one of Petaluma’s most enduring portals to wine culture. Located along Petaluma Boulevard at the, ahem, gateway to wine country (take that, Sonoma), it functions less like a single tasting room and more like a worldly dispatch point. Local Sonoma County vintages share the stage with bottles from Italy and Portugal and beyond, turning a casual glass into something like a miniature grand tour.

…

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As a concept, the billboard predates the advent of the ever-shrinking American attention span. Ancient Egyptians carved public notices into stone—arguably the first “out-of-home media buy.” By the 1830s, ur–Mad Man Jared Bell was plastering New York City with oversized posters to hawk circus acts like Barnum & Bailey, thus inventing what we’d recognize as the modern billboard. These were large, loud and impossible to ignore. Which is to say: not much has changed.

My particular incarnation—glowing over Rohnert Park in crisp LED glory—lasts roughly as long as a TikTok clip, but bigger. A lot bigger. It’s a sideways, 48-foot-wide by 14-foot-tall social media post. It’s what multinational ad and PR firm Publicis Groupe’s Rishad…

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For Gen X, it was the cockroach: that indestructible, allegedly nuke-proof pest that can survive anything. And like everything we learned as feral children of the ’70s and ’80s, it was both true and entirely the wrong lesson.

When I think about my life and career—from a teen publishing poetry pamphlets to an alt-weekly editor staring down AI while juggling nascent forays into radio and indie film—that cockroach mythos keeps waving its wiry antenna at me. It’s emblematic of a common fantasy: If I can just survive the next big disruption, I’ll be fine.

We cling to that mythology as industries collapse and technologies leap over us. They say the internet killed print, the algorithm killed the internet, that AI will kill us all. And what do we do? Nothing. In the ’80s, vi…

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This set in motion a series of events mired in controversy and still hotly debated to this day. It also revealed a principle anyone facing long odds would do well to cultivate.

But first a ring of the bell..

Ding-ding!

The rematch was set for May 25, 1965. There were whispers of a fix, of mob entanglements, of contractual subterfuge in the wake of their first fight. The World Boxing Association had already stripped the title from Clay, now the newly renamed Muhammad Ali, amid the surrounding chaos. Doubt clung to the bout like backroom cigar smoke.

Despite all this, the match proceeded—for all of a minute and half. Ali threw a punch so hard and so fast that Liston was suddenly down on his back. The Big Bear, as he was nicknamed, rolled over, got his right knee underneath him but fell on his back again, KO’d.

The fight was over in the first round…

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As a Gen Xer, I came of age when cores only came in two flavors—hard and soft—and everyone but Eddie Rabbit treated it as either a wet leper (remember the blacktop chant “Rain, rain, go away…?”) or as a biblical panacea a la Taxi Driver’s DeNiro proselytizing that “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” (well, Bob, we’re still waiting). 

Even The Beatles had an opinion (“…might as well be dead…”) and Charlie Chaplin who said “I always like walking in the rain, so no one can see me crying,” which makes me just wanna slap him. But no one ever mentions loamy post-rain aroma in song, verse, or the twee musings of …

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Poet Edward Estlin Cummings, perhaps better known as  e.e. cummings, loved spring nearly as much as he despised using his typewriter’s shift key. 

The man was notorious for pioneering new frontiers for lowercase letters—he rarely used capital letters, enough that academics covered for him by framing his aversion as a “radical experimentation with form.” Of the demonstrably few times the man used capital letters, one time, tellingly, was to spell “Spring” in his poem “Spring is like a perhaps hand.” It should be noted that the Associated Press Stylebook does not capitalize the season, ditto Vanity Fair, which follows AP guidelines and where Cummings did a stint a century ago. Which is to say he should know better, so we must assume Spring’s capital “S” was a deliberate, artistic choice. And in this rare instance, I support it because Spring, especially in the North Bay, is a proper noun in my book. 

Here, Spring is a living, breathing being, brimming with life,…

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Now, I’m headlong into a long-simmering project that I’ve mulled in various incarnations for the past two decades. The Press Club is in many ways the unified field theory of my career as both a journo and filmmaker… (Would you believe that making documentaries never occurred to me until writing this very sentence? Shit.) Thus far, I’ve resisted crossing the streams of journalism and filmmaking because I know, instinctively, that a poorly executed result would destroy any going proposition in either—and likely me in the process. 

This is why I outline.

For me, it starts with genre—I need the broad contours of convention in which to project my weird notions lest they become too unw…

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In a bookstore yesterday, I clocked a stack of calendars going for 90% off. Albeit, it’s February, and calendars have about as much shelf life as the bananas one  buys in a fit of virtuousness in the produce aisle, only to watch them blacken on the countertop. But still, the rest of the year is on clearance.

Time used to be money. Now no one knows what either are other than we have neither. Which is why getting a whole year as a calendar for 10% the usual rate seems a little undervalued. When it comes to the denominations of time, a year—though less than a decade, century or millennium—is still worth more than the chump change we feed parking meters, right? Save the coins for minutes and hours. I don’t have time to change my time-to-change ratio.

Time is the one currency we’re allotted by fate—we can’t acquire any more of it, and we often spend it unwisely (think hangovers, Jerry Bruckheimer films, the DMV). We get what we get, and we never know how much that is …

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Memory: When I was the arts editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier I had my own desk and a half wall behind on which there was a corkboard. This was in the 90s when stationers started reproducing tawdry pulp fiction imagery as pop-art postcards and other ephemera, so when my pal Abe spied a postcard rendition of Thomas Polsky’s Curtains for the Editor, he sent it to me. 

On one side was a sporting  goad to complete my first novel and on the other the image of a slain newspaper editor sprawled over a sheaf of paper, scaled such that the victim appeared miniture. 

Naturally, I pinned it to my half-wall gallery, which included a copy of the Fluxus “Total Art Match-Box” (“Use these matches to destroy all art…”) and other ephemera bef…

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